1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a multimedia information audiovisual apparatus which enables a user to see and listen to a presentation composed of media information including document media such as still pictures and texts and streaming media such as sounds, dynamic pictures, animations and graphics.
2. Related Art
Heretofore, there has been proposed a system for marking, writing personal memos on or annotating a digital document like writing memos on or marking a printed document for feed-back to an author. In the future, such a technology for assisting editing work on digital documents will be becoming very important in such a scene that cooperation is carried out over a network along with the further expansion of a network and the popularization of multimedia documents.
A system capable of annotating a document consisting of pages such as a presentation using a so-called OHP is disclosed by Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. Hei 5-189431. The system disclosed by this publication is able to annotate document media which do not include streaming media such as texts, figures and images without impairing the security of an original document. In this system, an annotation is written in a layer different from that of a document, thereby eliminating editing work on the original document. This is a technology which is made possible with digital documents.
A method for retrieving a point in a multimedia document is disclosed by Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. Hei 8-235209. This publication teaches a method for specifying a certain point on the time axis of streaming media (time axis media) in order to retrieve a desired scene from multimedia information consisting of a plurality of media.
As described above, prior art technologies for specifying a certain point (in space or time) of a presentation and adding a xe2x80x9cmarkerxe2x80x9d or other information relate to document media mainly composed of pages. As for streaming media having a time axis, there exists only a technology for specifying a certain xe2x80x9cpointxe2x80x9d on the time axis for the purpose of retrieval and there is not disclosed a technology for adding a xe2x80x9cmarkerxe2x80x9d to a certain range of streaming media.
A network conference which is carried out asynchronously for relatively long time (for example, several days or more) is taken into consideration.
When a user understands what happened while he/she was away from the network conference, he/she accesses the hysteresis of the conference and reads it, tracing the sequence of speeches made by other members. Since most of such network conferences are currently carried out using only text data, it is not so difficult to understand the progress of a conference by tracing the time sequence and reference link.
However, in the near future, network conferences will be carried out using multimedia and the opinions of speakers and materials are expected to be stored as multimedia information. Further, a conference system is expected to take multimedia minutes on a real-time basis. When a user who already saw and listened to such multimedia minutes is to see and listen to multimedia minutes which were updated after that, such a problem is conceivable that efficiency is extremely low because he/she has to see the same scene many times if he/she does not know which part was updated (not read) and which part he/she saw (read).
In the prior art, an unread part or read part of a presentation (media mixed presentation) a plurality of media of which are reproduced on multiple windows at the same time cannot be specified fully. That is, in the prior art, one point on the single time axis of a streaming medium can be specified. When mark information indicating a read part or unread part is added to the media mixed presentation, such contents as xe2x80x9cfrom where to where (on the time axis)xe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cwhich part of the presentation or which medium contentsxe2x80x9d are omitted.
In recent years, various general-purpose methods for processing digital documents have been proposed but a method for managing mark information to be added to streaming media or the like is yet to be reported.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a multimedia information audiovisual apparatus which can suitably add mark information to streaming media forming a presentation and manage the mark information. It is another object of the present invention to provide a multimedia information audiovisual apparatus which enables a user to see and listen to a presentation effectively.
The above objects of the present invention are attained by a multimedia information audiovisual apparatus comprising a media information management part which manages media information including streaming media having a time axis, a reproduction scenario management part which manages scenario information describing a combination in time and space of the media information for executing a presentation, a visual information reproduction part which reproduces visual media information included in the media information, a sound information reproduction part which reproduces sound media information included in the media information, and a scenario interpretation part which reads the media information from the media information management part based on the scenario information and causes the visual information reproduction part or the sound information reproduction part to reproduce the media information, wherein the apparatus further comprises a marking information management part which manages marking information for relating the media information described in the scenario information, mark information related to the media information and a time duration in a presentation during which the mark information is related to the media information.